Finished: The Optimist's Daughter (Welty) Pulitzer Prize winning novel written by Mississippi born Eudora Welty, about a grown daughter who rushes home to be by her father's side when he needs cataract surgery, only to have him never recover his will to live after the surgery. Following doctor's orders to lie as still as possible, Judge McKelva, does that after his eye surgery, with either his daughter, Laurel, or his second, younger wife, Fay, by his side. Laurel reads from him every day from some of their favorite classics, but when the self-centered Fay is there, all she does is complain about the situation he's left her in and bitch at him to finish healing up. It eventually becomes clear that the judge isn't improving, and one night, he seems to give up on life, and dies. Laurel and Fay react differently, Fay making it all about herself. Laurel takes her father home to be buried in Mount Salus, Mississippi, the house she grew up in with her father and her beloved mother, Becky, who died twelve years before. Surrounded by loving neighbors and old family friends, Laurel, though in shock, is able to mourn her father. No one in the town has ever understood what the highly loved and respected Judge McKelva saw in the younger, shriller Fay. True to form, Fay arrives late to her own husband's viewing, and then makes a scene. At least Laurel has the time before she arrives to truly mourn with the people who loved their family. Fay's uncouth, equally self-centered family arrives at the funeral from Texas, and Fay decides to go home with them for a few days. She makes a point of reminding Laurel that the house and everything in it belongs to her...AND...that she can't wait to get rid of some of this "junk" that was important to the judge. :-( Though those closet to her try to convince Laurel to move on back home, Laurel is determined to just spend the weekend there, and then head back to her job in Chicago before Fay gets back. So...the rest of the book is spent with Laurel reminiscing in the house, and it's a tear-jerker! I think it affected me so much because my own mother's death still seems so fresh on my mind....and I will never get over losing my dad, who was also a very beloved and highly respected person...and also happened to be from a small town in northern Louisiana, which is about the same as being from a small town in Mississippi. It all just seemed so familiar and tugged terribly at my heart. Anyway, Laurel spends time in her father's library, looking at his old books, and going through his desk drawers, which she never dared do as a child. The desk alone had been his great-grandfather's and held so many memories for Laurel of her dad sitting there. One of her dearest memories is that of being a girl drifting off to sleep at night to the sound of her father and mother taking turns reading to each other every night from whatever book they were reading. Laurel also spends time outside tending to her mother, Becky's, beloved rose bushes. She keeps drifting back to when she was a little girl, as far as she could remember, once a year she and her mother would take the train to West Virginia where her mother had grown up, to the house in the mountains. When Laurel finds her mother's old writing desk stored away in a little sewing room, she then goes even further into her memories as she finds every letter her father ever wrote her mother, and also finds their "beginning of courtship" memory album. I kept saying to myself, surely she's going to keep some of these things?? Take them with her?? But instead, she just relishes the memories, lives all the feelings all over again, and then, sure enough, heads back to Chicago after the weekend. I tell you, she was a much stronger person that I! It's exactly how my husband is, though...memories and people, not things, he says. I know what he means, but I also like having the few old things I have of my grandparents, and now my parents. I love sitting in my dad's old easy chair, as much as Laurel sunk down into her father's desk chair and let the feeling of him envelope her. This was a very good book, and I wish so much that I had read it while my hubby's Aunt Barbara was still alive. She was born and raised in Mississippi and became a writer and Eudora Welty was her favorite author. I would love to have discussed this book with her. Just one more lesson learned by me....don't put off talking to the people you love about things from the past, memories, or anything at all!